Testing

[Hal Murray]

>> How important is your individual way of doing things?  Would you
>> be willing to tolerate some inconvenience if that made the rest of us
>> more productive?
> In principle, yes.  I'd need to be persuaded that the net was positive -
> that the rest of you got sped up more than I got slowed down.  Past
> experience makes me skeptical of such claims. 

Productivity is more than just lines-of-code pushed per day.  You have to 
include the disruption when a buggy patch gets pushed.

I don't remember any details, but I do remember having to sort out more than 
one quirk when I was in the middle of working on something else.  That was a 
long time ago.  The general condition of our code may have improved enough so 
that is less of a problem now.

I also remember being grumpy about it.  No big deal in some sense.  Shit 
happens.  But sometimes when you are head down in the middle of something 
that sort of distraction is annoying.

--------

> Prompt response to a user-visible bug is the case I was thinking of. Hans
> Meyer's rash of small problems with ntpq, for example, all pretty trivial
> once chracterized.  He was being so helpful that I put a high value on
> addressing his issiues immediately, giving him rapid confirmation that we
> cared about his issues and were on top of them.

> To a lesser extent this applies to anything that arrives on the issue
> tracker, I mean, as opposed to long-term development work.  I want us to get
> a reputation for respomsiveness, and "Fix waiting on review" doesn't have
> quite the same oomph as "Fix pushed." 

There is a broad spectrum of changes from small bug fixes and minor cleanups 
to significant new features and massive reorganizations.

Even with something like a simple bug fix, some are easy to test and very 
unlikely to break anything else and some can't be tested by the fixer and 
some have potential to break something else.

I'd be happy with a work flow that encouraged direct push for low-risk 
changes.  (That may turn into an endless argument about what is low-risk.)

It may be that what I'm really looking for is more discussion of interesting 
changes before they get pushed.  Maybe my suggestion of a reviewer was an 
attempt to encourage discussion.  Even an email announcement without any 
actual follow on discussion would avoid surprises when doing a git pull.

Is there a mailing list option that gets me the git log info as things are 
pushed?


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.